States should place ban on eating cats, dogs

Who among us probably thought there was no need to worry about dogs and cats ending up on dinner tables, because such a thing has surely been illegal in Pennsylvania for time out of mind?

Show of hands? Wow, that’s a lot of hands, a lot of sensible but totally mistaken hands.

It seems that the slaughter of dogs and cats for human consumption has never been illegal in Pennsylvania, so long as that slaughter happens in a humane fashion, as though that might possibly make some kind of difference.

In fact, only about a half-dozen states have laws on the books banning the butchering of cats and dogs for their meat, including New York and New Jersey.

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It seems Pennsylvania may be about to join them.

The state House passed a bill recently to prohibit the killing of dogs and cats for meat, and also ban the breeding, selling and processing of dogs and cats for food.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Rep. John Maher, R-Allegheny, introduced the bill in October as a measure against what he called “slaughterhouses” hiding in plain sight.

Discoveries of such operations have been rare, he said, sharing with the Inquirer a memo to fellow lawmakers describing the incidents as “infrequent but disturbing. … Perhaps more disturbing is the knowledge selling or slaughtering dogs and cats for human consumption is not illegal in Pennsylvania.”

It seems his House colleagues strongly agreed, since the vote to approve the bill was unanimous.

Look, we understand that some cultures find nothing odious about eating cats and dogs. Plentiful meat of any kind is probably a godsend for people perpetually in a state of near-starvation in certain regions of the globe, and far be it for us to suggest that the life of a dog or cat should be prioritized over that of a human being. The human survival instinct is what it is.

But one of the side effects of Americans’ quality of life — admittedly and perhaps luckily much higher than others’ — is that we long passed the days where basic survival needs relegated all animals simply to potential sources of protein. Our working animals eventually became near and dear companions, to the point where eating them became widely taboo.

And despite our respect for the cultural diversity that comes with our founding as a nation of immigrants, some things remain out of bounds to the much larger part of our population that finds eating cats and dogs repugnant.

This is very much a case of a loophole existing precisely because so few modern Americans would ever assume that such a thing wouldn’t already be illegal within our own culture.

We expect the Senate will likely agree, approve this bill as soon as possible, and send it along to our governor to become law.